208 HISTORY OF GREECE. his native place. The inhabitants of Knidus, a place situated on a long outlying tongue of land, at first tried to cut through the narrow isthmus which joined them to the continent, but aban- doned the attempl with a facility which Herodotus explains by referring it to a prohibition of the oracle: 1 nor did either the Karians or the Kaunians offer any serious resistance. The Lykians only, in their chief town Xanthus, made a desperate defence. Having in vain tried to repel the assailants in the open field, and finding themselves blocked up in their city, they set fire to it with their own hands ; consuming in the flames their women, children, and servants, while the armed citizens marched out and perished to a man in combat with the enemy. 2 Such an act of brave and even ferocious despair is not in the Grecian character. In recounting, however, the languid defence and easy submission of the Greeks of Knidus, it may surprise us to call to mind that they were Dorians and colonists from Sparta. So that the want of steadfast courage, often imputed to Ionic Greeks as compared to Dorian, ought properly to be charged on Asiatic Greeks as compared with European ; or rather upon that mixture of indigenous with Hellenic population, which all the Asiatic colonies, in common with most of the other colonies, presented, and which in Halikarnassus was particularly remark- able ; for it seems to have been half Karian, half Dorian, and was even governed by a line of Karian despots. Harpagus and the Persians thus mastered, without any con- siderable resistance, the western and southern portions of Asia Minor ; probably, also, though we have no direct account of it, the entire territory within the Halys which had before been ruled by Croesus. The tributes of the conquered Greeks were transmitted to Ekbatana instead of to Sardis. While Harpagus was thus employed, Cyrus himself had been making still more extensive conquests in Upper Asia and Assyria, of which 1 shall .ipeak in the coming chapter. 1 Hcrodot. i, 1 74.
- Hcrodot. i, 176. The whole population of Xantl us perished, except
Eighty families accidentally absent : the subsequent occupants of the town were recruited from strangers. Nearly five centuries afterwards, Jiei* descendants in the same city slew themselves in the like desperate and tragical manner, to avoid surrendering to the Roman arm f under Marcus Brutus f Plutarch, Brutus, c. 31).
